Former Vice President Joe Biden is making another run for the White House, he announced on Thursday. The former senator, who served as chair of the influential Judiciary Committee that helped shape U.S. drug policy during an era of heightened scaremongering and criminalization, was among the most prominent Democratic drug warriors in Congress for decades.

And while many 2020 Democratic candidates have evolved significantly on drug policy—and particularly marijuana reform—over the years, Biden has barely budged.

It includes the video of Biden bragging about adding death penalties for drug crimes.

There are plenty of Democratic candidates in the field and all of them are better on drug policy than Joe Biden.

17 comments to The latest addition to the Democratic field may be the worst

If the Dems nominate Biden for president they don’t deserve to win, and Trump will get four more years. Wake up Dems, the party of Biden, Pelosi, Wasserface and the rest of the dinosaurs are unelectable.

The Marijuana Moment piece on Joe Biden missed an important drug war achievement in the Delaware senator’s career as über-prohibitionist. While on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in May, 2000, then Senator Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr, authored the 44-page report that initiated Plan Colombia:

Joseph Biden, Aid to “Plan Colombia”: The Time for Assistance Is Now: Report to Senate Foreign Relations Committee (2000).

Plan Colombia ultimately contained a multi-million dollar bonus for the two leading helicopter companies in the US. John Lindsey-Poland discussed the cozy arrangement in his book Plan Colombia: US Ally Atrocities and Community Activism:

…The helicopters that represented the largest U.S. investment in drug war and counterinsurgent strategy in Colombia, and were used to give tours for visiting U.S. officials, operated always from above, as did the satellites that guided bombs to guerrilla camps. Those who are “above” have important knowledge, which may be cold, detached from its consequences on the ground; so too do those who are “below,” whose visceral experience may contribute to deep understanding, limit cognitive capacity through trauma, or both. [Kindle 621] […]

Two leading helicopter manufacturers, Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation and Bell Textron, also actively lobbied for budget outlays from Plan Colombia. The companies gave free helicopter rides over Washington to Congressional staffers, and Textron even hired a former Colombian ambassador to lobby. They needed a financial boost. “The market for military equipment abroad is not great these days, and obviously these companies have to sustain their production base,” Army War College specialist Gabriel Marcella told the Los Angeles Times in 2000.19 [Kindle 1363]

Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut, home of Sikorsky, also on the Foreign Relations Committee, lobbied hard for Plan Colombia. As did Sen. Paul Coverdell (R-GA), who proclaimed a new Colombian domino theory, stating that “Colombia is the heart of the drug war, and we’d better get on with it. If we lose Colombia, then we lose everywhere.”

The tone of Senators Biden, Dodd, and Coverdale in relation to drugs and Colombia fits a well-known propaganda technique acknowledged by Nazi propagandist Hermann Göring during the Nuremberg trials:

Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

Authoritarianism in its application to drug enforcement continues to work in reverse. Canadian researchers led by Dr Emily Jenkins, a University of British Columbia professor of nursing who studies youth substance use, say that authoritarians like Joe Biden are being inept when they tell kids not to do drugs:

…a new study from researchers … is showing the way forward, they found that a harm reduction message resonated the most with teens, instead of the typical “don’t do drugs” talk.

“Teens told us that they generally tuned out abstinence–only or zero–tolerance messaging because it did not reflect the realities of their life,” said Jenkins. “Either they or their peers were already using substances, or substance use was happening in their own family circles.”

“Youth were more receptive when their parents talked — in a non-judgmental way — about substance use or could point to resources or strategies to help minimize the harms of use. This approach seemed to work better in preserving family relationships and youth health,” said Jenkins.

Some teens who used substances despite their families’ zero-tolerance approach reported feeling disconnected from their families. One participant, who consumed alcohol occasionally, experienced difficulties with her mother, who never drank. “When she was a teenager she never did any of that…so to her, that’s like, I’m going to hell,” she said. […]

Another participant whose family took a zero-tolerance position found himself unable to help a friend who was struggling with cannabis use and whose family also shunned substance use of any kind. “I just can’t help him if his dad’s not going to say anything,” he told the researchers.

However, teens still valued setting limits, the study showed.

“An overly lenient approach to substance use did not work either,” said Jenkins. “One participant who drank alcohol frequently said she was ‘sick of it’ but did not know how to scale back her drinking as her parents ‘don’t really care about what I do. I could go home drunk and they won’t do anything.'” […]

“The numbers show that the greatest levels of substance use and related harms occur amongst young people, yet youth perspectives are often missing when we formulate parental approaches to substance use,” said Jenkins. “This study goes beyond the typical approach, which features adult perspectives, and brings youth knowledge and expertise, a critical missing element in substance use programming.” […]

Arrrgh. Cunning plans, greed, corruption and vice. Disgusting people then and disgusting people now. These people always liked to talk about some imaginary child to save, while they dumped deadly poisons on real children and their food, and terrorized, shot, and murdered real children in the name of the War on Drugs. Joe Biden is one of the worst.

Biden. Huh. Another of the decrepit Dem machine kingmakers on political life-support, who’s on his way out, while the young Dem radicals have slipped the machine’s leash and are loudly braying heresies. Biden’s another example of Fourth Turning politics advancing apace, refusing to acknowledge his irrelevance that everyone else can see plainly.

Cannabis use as an adjunct to exercise has become a trend in marijuana-legal states, improving physical outcomes and dispelling the couchlock myth:

30-Apr-2019 — Eight out of 10 marijuana users in states where cannabis is legal say they partake in the drug shortly before or after exercise, and most report that it motivates them to work out, helps them enjoy exercise more and improves their recovery, according to surprising new University of Colorado Boulder research.

The paper, published Tuesday in the journal Frontiers in Public Health, is among the first to explore the complicated intersection between cannabis use and physical activity.

While many assume the former impedes the latter, the data suggest otherwise.

“There is a stereotype that cannabis use leads people to be lazy and couch-locked and not physically active, but these data suggest that this is not the case,” said senior author Angela Bryan, a professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience and the Institute for Cognitive Science. […]

Some have speculated that increased use could worsen the obesity epidemic by fueling a sedentary lifestyle. On the other hand, the authors note, the World Anti-Doping Agency prohibits cannabis use in sporting competitions due to its potential to improve performance.

Anecdotally, ultrarunners sometimes use marijuana to battle nausea and boredom on long runs. And epidemiological studies show cannabis-users tend to be leaner, less prone to diabetes and have healthier blood sugar levels. […]

“There is evidence to suggest that certain cannabinoids dampen pain perception, and we also know that the receptors cannabis binds to in the brain are very similar to the receptors that are activated naturally during the runners high,” said co-author Arielle Gillman, a former PhD student in Bryan’s lab who recently published a review paper on the subject. “Theoretically, you could imagine that if it could dampen pain and induce an artificial ‘runner’s high,’ it could keep people motivated.”

Cannabis is also anti-inflammatory, which could aid recovery. […]

Preliminary results of that separate study show that after embarking on a 16-week exercise program, the cannabis users exercised more than the non-users.

“As we get older, exercise starts to hurt, and that is one reason older adults don’t exercise as much,” Bryan said. “If cannabis could ease pain and inflammation, helping older adults to be more active that could be another benefit.”

Progress was made at the University of Bristol by researchers Alexandra Fletcher-Jones, et al., in describing the function of cannabinoid receptors (CB1Rs) in the brain:

30-Apr-2019 — …CB1Rs help control information flow in the brain by binding molecules made in the brain called endocannabinoids, which influence brain functions such as pain, appetite, mood and memory. Unusually, endocannabinoid signalling goes in the reverse direction compared to most other neurotransmitters. The ‘receiving’ CB1Rs are located at presynaptic sites on axons, whereas the release sites are at postsynaptic sites on dendrites. […]

This reverse or ‘retrograde’ signalling that activates presynaptic CB1Rs ‘dampens down’ presynaptic release of other neurotransmitters resulting in a slowing of brain activity. Moreover, the active components of cannabis bind to CB1Rs in a similar manner to endocannabinoids, resulting in the ‘mellow’ sensation caused by the recreational use of cannabis.

For CB1Rs to regulate brain function properly, it is essential that they are sent to the right place on the surface of the axon. However, very little is known about exactly how this occurs. The research published today [Tuesday 30 April] in eLife investigated how this process happens.

The Bristol group showed that a specific part of the CB1R protein plays a key role in the getting CB1R into axons. The research team tracked newly made CB1Rs in nerve cells grown in a dish and found that a short region of CB1R is crucial for sending CB1R to the axon and preventing it from going to the dendrites. They also discovered that this region stabilises CB1R at the surface of the axon, making it more available to receive signals from endocannabinoids.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that activation of CB1Rs could be therapeutically useful for a wide range of diseases such as chronic pain, epilepsy, or multiple sclerosis. Understanding the fundamental properties of CB1R is an important basis for future studies exploring the efficacy and optimisation of these targeted approaches.” […]

April 26, 2019 — Biden kicked off his third presidential run on Thursday with an ominous and somewhat cumbersome 6:00 am tweet — “[E]verything that has made America — America — is at stake.” The announcement tweet failed to mention Biden’s plans to attend a big-dollar fundraiser hosted by David Cohen, chief lobbyist for Comcast, the most despised company in the country. This, morosely, is par for a very long course. […]

Though he labels himself a friend to working people… Biden voted in favor of one of the most ruthlessly anti-worker bills in modern legislative history, the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, depriving millions of the protections provided by Chapter 7 bankruptcy. For this, and for his pro-corporate labors stretching all the way back to 1978, he has earned the financial devotion of the too-big-to-fail club many times over. […]

At Truthdig, My Letter from Joe Biden by Scott Ritter, a Marine major exemplifying unique qualifications who upset Joe Biden when Major Ritter resigned as a chief weapons inspector with the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) charged with overseeing the disarmament of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs, writes:

May 1, 2019 — The 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq by a U.S.-led coalition will go down in history as one of the greatest geopolitical disasters in modern history. Then-Sen. Joe Biden was in a unique position to prevent this war from happening. That he chose not to speaks volumes about the man who now seeks to become the next president of the United States. My personal experiences with Biden from 1998 to 2002 provide a window into the character of the man that Americans should familiarize themselves with before considering whether to give him their support. […]

April 29, 2019 — …as the ultimate Washington insider, Biden long ago had learned to make friends with the military and to master the rhetoric of framing overseas military interventions in a liberal humanitarian rhetoric.

Following the ouster of Libyan strongman Muammar Qaddafi in the Operation Odyssey Dawn, Biden bragged that the United States “didn’t lose a single life,” and that “this is more of the prescription for how to deal with the world as we go forward than it has been in the past.” However, Libya has since fallen into sectarian warfare, with over 180,000 Libyans risking their lives to escape to Italy. The country is being taken over by a brutal CIA-trained warlord, Khalifa al-Hiftar, whose forces have been accused of committing unlawful executions, torture, beheadings and bombing schools. […]

Biden visited Kiev numerous times during Ukraine’s subsequent military campaign that had a destructive local effect and became close with the new Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko, CEO of a chocolate conglomerate with a net worth of $1.3 billion who was so unpopular that he lost the recent 2019 election to a comedian with no previous political experience.

Right after the coup, Biden’s son, Hunter joined the board of one of Ukraine’s most profitable and corrupt energy companies, Burisma, which gave the potential to the Bidens of becoming billionaires. Journalist Peter Schweizer points out that Biden regularly consulted with Poroshenko by telephone and made five trips to the Ukraine while his son’s business partners prepared to strike a profitable deal with controversial and reportedly violent oligarchs Ihor Kolomoisky and Mykola Zlochevsky….

April 26, 2019 — “In 1984, the Washington Post specifically named him [Biden], along with Gary Hart and Bill Bradley, as one of the best-known figures among that era’s Democratic Party’s ‘neo-liberals,’ who ‘singled out slimming the role of government and pushing new technology’….Biden built his career advertising himself as someone who refuses to toe the progressive line. He proudly boasted of defying liberal orthodoxy on school busing, for instance. But throughout his career, that boast has most often taken the form of bashing liberal ‘special interests.’ Biden toured the country in 1985 chiding…unions and farmers for being too narrowly focused, and complained that Democrats too often ‘think in terms of special interests first and the greater interest second.’ In the latter case, Biden was specifically complaining about their opposition to his calls for a spending freeze on entitlements and an increase in the retirement age” […]

April 3, 2019 – “The progressive wing, the far-left wing of the Democratic Party, doesn’t want any part of Joe Biden, for a number of reasons. Number one, he’s white. They don’t want a white candidate if they can get a person of color. Number two, he’s a capitalist. Whoa! They don’t want that. This is the far-left progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Number three, he’s not politically correct. He says stuff like, ‘Oh, Vice President Pence is a good guy,’ and they went wild because Pence is a very religious man who doesn’t believe in gay marriage,” O’Reilly said.

Oh Joe, ya just don’t get it do ya? Spouting off about Neo-Nazis and white supremacists? Joe your over zealous attitude towards Cannabis promoted more racism than the KKK. More people of color persecuted on your drug war legislations than Jim Crow. Grow up Joe, stop fear mongering.
Have a drink!https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D5bQymCUwAAtc66.jpg

“I’m not Bernie Sanders,” Joe Biden said at the Brookings Institution. “I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason why we’re in trouble. The folks at the top are not bad guys… wealthy Americans are just as patriotic as poor folks.”

Where Presidential Candidate Joe Biden Stands On Marijuana: “I still believe it’s a gateway drug. I’ve spent a lot of my life as chairman of the Judiciary Committee dealing with this. I think it would be a mistake to legalize.”https://t.co/Jw0DJqzBIv

The list of articles against Biden is increasing as much as his donations. Latest poll clearly shows Democrats have the attention span of a gnat. Biden is still doubling down on his Reefer Madness.

Geneticists revealed new biomarkers for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder that should help dispel myths about marijuana causing psychosis or violent behavior. Their research makes it more difficult to link THC directly to a dysfunction occurring epigenetically in the IGF2 gene. However, CBD might show relevance, as it’s been touted as an anti-psychotic with no side effects:

3-MAY-2019 — …”We’ve known since the 1970s that the effectiveness of antipsychotic medications is directly related to their ability to block dopamine signaling. However, the exact mechanism that sparks excessive dopamine in the brain and that leads to psychotic symptoms has been unclear,” said Viviane Labrie, Ph.D., assistant professor at Van Andel Research Institute (VARI) and corresponding author of the study, which appears in the May 3 edition of Nature Communications. “We now have a biological explanation that could help make a real difference for people with these disorders.” […]

“What we’re seeing is a one-two punch — the brain is being flooded with too much dopamine and at the same time it is losing these critical neural connections,” Labrie said. “Like many other neurological disorders, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder often have early, or prodromal, phases that begin years before obvious symptoms. It is our hope that our findings may lead to new biomarkers to screen for risk, which would then allow for earlier intervention.” […]

…analyses revealed a cluster of epigenetic marks, which switch genes on and off, in an enhancer at a gene called IGF2, a critical regulator of synaptic development. Enhancers are stretches of DNA that help activate genes and can be major players in the development of diseases in the brain and other tissues.

This enhancer also controls the activity of a nearby gene called tyrosine hydroxylase, which produces an enzyme that keeps dopamine in check. When the enhancer is epigenetically switched on, production of dopamine becomes dysregulated, resulting in too much of the chemical in the brain.

Taken together, molecular changes at this site may explain why psychosis brought on by dopamine frequently is accompanied by a disruption of brain synapses, a devastating double-hit that promotes symptoms. […]

21-MAY-2019 — Promising and exciting. Those are the words used by Dr. Stephanie McGrath to describe findings from a pilot study to assess the use of cannabidiol, or CBD, for dogs with epilepsy.

McGrath, a neurologist at Colorado State University’s James L. Voss Veterinary Teaching Hospital, led a small study with 16 pet dogs to assess the short-term effect of CBD on seizure frequency.

Based on her research, McGrath found that 89 percent of dogs who received CBD in the clinical trial had a reduction in the frequency of seizures. Nine dogs were treated with CBD, while seven in a control group were treated with a placebo.

The research took place from 2016 to 2017, and results are published in the June 1 issue of the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association.

Idiopathic epilepsy, which occurs with no known cause, affects up to 5.7% of the pet dog population worldwide, making it the most common canine neurologic condition.

And CBD is proving itself helpful in reducing the addiction cravings of heroin use disorder:

21-MAY-2019…Yasmin Hurd, PhD, the Ward-Coleman Chair of Translational Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Director of the Addiction Institute at Mount Sinai and first author of the study. “The specific effects of CBD on cue-induced drug craving and anxiety are particularly important in the development of addiction therapeutics because environmental cues are one of the strongest triggers for relapse and continued drug use.”

Previous preclinical work conducted by Dr. Hurd and her lab team at Mount Sinai, in animals with a history of heroin self-administration, demonstrated that CBD reduced the animals’ tendency to use heroin in response to a drug-associated cue. To determine whether the preclinical work could be translated to humans, her lab then conducted a series of clinical studies that demonstrated CBD was safe and tolerable in humans. […]

The study team found that CBD, in contrast to placebo, significantly reduced both the craving and anxiety induced by drug cues compared with neutral cues in the acute term. CBD also showed significant protracted effects on these measures seven days after the final short-term exposure. In addition, CBD reduced the drug cue-induced physiological measures of heart rate and salivary cortisol levels. There were no significant effects on cognition, and there were no serious adverse events. The capacity of CBD to reduce craving and anxiety one week after the final administration mirrors the results of the original preclinical animal study, suggesting that the effects of CBD are long-lasting, even when the cannabinoid would not be expected to be present in the body. […]

Differing cannabis genome profiles will be studied to sort out strains and specific medical effects of cannabinoids and terpenes:

29-MAY-2019 — Research from Washington State University could provide government regulators with powerful new tools for addressing a bevy of commercial claims and other concerns as non-medical marijuana, hemp and CBD products become more commonplace. The new analysis of the genetic and chemical characteristics of cannabis is believed to be the first thorough examination of its kind.

The current method is inadequate, says Mark Lange, a professor in WSU’s Institute for Biological Chemistry. Regulators focus on levels of the psychoactive compound THC and just a handful of the more than 90 other cannabinoids. The industry makes various claims about different strains, from sedating indicas to invigorating sativas, Acapulco Gold to Zkittlez, but they defy objective analysis.

“There is a reason why all these strains have different names – because a lot of them are very different,” said Lange. “But some strains with different names are actually very similar. The bottom line is there is a lot of confusion.” […]

Lange’s analytical method, for example, can be used to clearly delineate between psychoactive cannabis and hemp, which by law has to have less than 0.3 percent THC. It might help identify the skunky smell that elicits complaints from the neighbors of pot farms, opening a way to breed and grow something easier on the nose. It can test the health claims of cannabidiol, known by the shorthand CBD, or the alleged synergy, known as the “entourage effect,” between cannabis compounds. […]

“One of the things that needs to happen in the emerging market is that you know what you’re selling,” said Lange. “You can’t just call it something and then that’s good. We need to be very clear that this is the cannabinoid profile that is associated with, say, Harlequin -it has a specific cannabinoid profile, a specific terpenoid profile, and that’s what it is. If it has a different name, then it should have a different profile. Currently you can do whatever you want.” […]

Many opioid related ODs also exhibit polysubstance use and social problems:

29-MAY-2019 — … During the two year period studied, there were 2,244 opioid-related overdose deaths in Massachusetts with toxicology results available. Seventeen percent of those deaths had only opioids present, 36 percent had opioids and stimulants (primarily cocaine), and 46 percent had opioids plus other substances, but not stimulants. The data also indicated that individuals over the age of 24, non-rural residents, those with co-morbid mental illness, non-Hispanic black residents, and those with recent homelessness were more likely to have opioids and stimulants, such as cocaine or methamphetamine, in their systems at their time of death than opioids alone.

“As a provider, these findings indicate a pressing need to address and treat not just opioid use disorder, but other substances that patients are misusing,” said lead author Joshua Barocas, MD, who also is an infectious disease physician at BMC and assistant professor of medicine at BU School of Medicine. The challenge, he says, is that while there are FDA-approved medications to treat opioid use disorder, there are not effective medications to treat other substances, such as cocaine or amphetamines.

Additionally, the data clearly shows that untreated mental illness and social determinants of health are risk factors for overdose death. Specifically, those who are homeless or have mental illness are more likely to use opioids and stimulants, and more work is needed to identify ways to better engage these individuals in care. “To truly make a difference in reducing opioid overdose deaths, we must tackle issues such as homelessness and access to mental health services. This means not only investing in treatment but also implementing tailored programs that address the specific barriers to accessing care.”

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